Interesting facts about the language

Slovenian belongs to the Slavic language family. The Slavic language family is further divided into an East Slavic (Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian), a West Slavic (Polish, Slovak, and Czech), and a South Slavic subgroup. Along with Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Croatian, the Slovene language also belongs to this latter group. All Slavic languages have their origins in Proto-Slavic, which was spoken until the first centuries AD and emerged as an independent branch of the Indo-European (primordial) language about 5,000 years ago.

Slovene is most closely related to Croatian, from which many borrowings in the Slovene vocabulary originate. German also originally had a strong influence on Slovene, but since the 19th century, attempts have been made to reduce the use of German loanwords in favor of Slavicisms. In 1808, the linguist Jernej Kopitar created a grammar for the Slovene language that incorporated numerous Slavic loanwords and laid the foundation for the standardization of the written language. Slovene uses the Latin alphabet—in contrast to several other Slavic languages, such as Russian and Ukrainian, which are written with Cyrillic letters.

However, there are three special letters in the Slovenian alphabet: č (pronounced like a German tsch in, for example, the Czech Republic), š (pronounced like a German sch in the word Schokolade) and ž (pronounced like a French g in, for example, Garage). Some letters are also pronounced slightly differently in Slovenian than you are used to from German. For example, the Slovenian c is pronounced like a German z (as in the word Zug), the h like a German ch (as in, for example, Buch), the s always like a sharp ß (as in the word Fuß) and the Slovenian z like a soft s in German (as in the word Riese).

Today, Slovenian (Slovenščina) is spoken as a native language by approximately 2.4 million people, the majority of whom (1.8 million) live in the Republic of Slovenia, where it is also the official language. There, it is spoken as a native language by approximately 91% of the population. In addition to Slovenian, small population groups primarily speak Serbian and Croatian.